Friday, November 28, 2008

Dining in the New World

My medical school class is 104 students small. I know approximately 99 of these students by name and consider all of them friends. We usually cross paths, me and one or two or three other students as we walk to campus each morning. If I don't join up with any friends on the neighborhood sidewalks, I usually greet a classmate at the bike racks outside of school. If I still haven't bumped into classmates (meaning that I am still reading my morning magazine, The Economist or National Geographic) as I enter the hospital, then I'm sure to join up with a handful of classmates getting their coffee or hot chocolate outside the student lounge. We converge every weekday morning at approximately 7:57 on the lecture hall indicated in our syllabus.

I spend most of my day with fellow students of medicine be it in lecture, lab, lunch, or small group. I study with med students outside of school, I eat dinner with friends from class, I go to movies or shows with med students. I play sports with other medical students. I'm not writing this thinking the reader is interested in knowing how I spend my am/pm hours. I am writing this to justify what I said at the dinner table Wednesday night.

Classes ended Wednesday at 12pm. I was on a plane two hours later bound for DC. Lil Sis picked me up and we cruised out to Poolesville for our first of many family dinners over this Thanksgiving break. The house as usual smelled incredible. Mom was near completion on some Indian soup masterpiece. It wasn't long before J & J arrived with the flat bread and away we ate. I don't know where the conversation was going (perhaps someone can chime in) but I enthusiastically announced, "Well, I was digging poop out of a cadaver this morning!" I realized, with the chorus of spoons clanking against the bowl that I just said something very, very disgusting. A split second later, the sound of the spoons dropping was replaced with moans of, "Ah, that is DISGUSTING...SICK...You just ruined everything, I can't believe you said that, that is DISGUSTING, I can't believe...!" All of the above accompanied of course with terrible looks of pain, anguish, and a pinch of anger.

I tried my best to recover, "Oh my, I'm sorry, I mean, I just made some precise incisions at various points along the small and large intestine to appreciate the differentiation of tissue & musculature...It's really not that gross, I mean, it wasn't like that...PROMISE, I'm sorry. Just looking at muscle..."

But the damage was done. There's no recovery from something like that. It rolled right off my tongue like it was common place, totally normal. Family holiday dinner conversation can get a little out of line but my family members were no where near prepared to handle something like that. I was honestly just as shocked as the rest of the family that I gave utterance to such a foul phrase. It took me a while to realize why I thought that was OK to say in the first place.

And now I realize: I'm always around med students. Our world of cadavers, histology, and physical exams is just that: our world. For better or worse, I am always around people who spend a couple hours a day dissecting, examining, and removing body parts from cadavers. What was at first overwhelming and taboo to us is now part of the daily grind. And it is only natural that my language reflect this new environment of medicine.

Declaring the above does not excuse me from respecting what is predictably and understandably disgusting to the rest of the world. I recognize this new language tendency has a time and a place. Please know that I will do my best to remember that; but if I do slip and say something that makes you feel a bit queasy, well, just take it as an invitation to join me in this new found world of mine.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Shorts, Tis Never the Season?

I pasted below an article I wrote last week for the school paper--the b-school paper, because there is no med school paper. Med students don't have time to write! It's a little more facetious than usual. Enjoy!



Economists and financial experts around the globe have tried to pinpoint the cause of the financial market collapse. Some policy wonks claim that our financiers got too smart, that our derivatives became too creative. I don’t know about you but I’ve never been taught that creative talent was a bad thing. Others try to say that we got too greedy, that we wanted things we couldn’t really afford. Again, I firmly believe that progress can only come about by pursuing those things that are at present out of our reach. The true reason why this country is in recession is because we as a nation have come up short with our dress codes. Standards are so lax that we are wearing shorts when pants are needed. We are wearing shorts to school; we are even wearing shorts to work!

In the Max Farash lecture on the 13th of November, Daniel Forrester presented a very inspiring and powerful formula for better decision-making. He argued that Simon students must rely on data; they must possess the ability to tell the story; they must be visual and conceptual thinkers; and they must reflect and iterate on their work. The contributors of the Simonist fully agree with the above formula, but we recognize it omits one critical element to informed decision-making: pants.

We’ve made a lot of poor decisions in recent years. All of those telecom mergers, health savings accounts, subprime mortgaging, leadership over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are a few examples of some of the poor decisions we’ve made, decisions that for the most part were made by people dressed in shorts, or camouflage—equally bad.

How did this happen? Many human resource departments cite global warming for their shorts friendly dress codes. The most famous example is the UN. The UN announced this past July that it was going to reduce its carbon footprint by raising the temperature of its historic world headquarters building in New York. The announcement was hailed by the media as a green move. Not so fast, Simon readers! The true motivation behind the policy change was to allow employees to wear shorts! UN workers were encouraged to discard the professional suit and tie to “comfortably” work in a warmer climate. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon crowned himself the “environmental secretary-general,” but the truth is that the Secretary had a fall out with his tailor and could not keep wearing his 2002 trousers around his 2008 waist. And what can be said about the productivity of the UN under its new A/C policy? Their absence on the Georgia invasion and they’re failure with everything they recently tried to put their hands on in Africa: Congo, Zimbabwe, South Africa, etc, highlights the effect of shorts in the work place.

This professional slide in America to casual wear is a direct effect of school children who were educated in pro-shorts institutions. Many American public and private schools at one time required children to wear trousers to class until the seminal ruling in 1979 when Moody v Cronin 484 F. Supp. 270 (C.D. Ill. 1979) ruled in behalf of the students—a decision made by individuals dressed in robes, not pants. This ruling led to many other dress codes being overturned. School children united and fought any school policies framing the issue as an anti-shorts policy. This cleaver campaign attracted huge donations from powerful organizations such as the ACLU and Sesame Street. The school administrators managed to get AARP behind them but that was not enough to counter the strength of the anti-shorts campaign.

I remember the monumental day when the no shorts law was revoked by my local school district. Many readers can recall such a day in their own past. It seemed so much like the right thing for us to do then. We saw a nation no longer divided by a pant line; we believed freedom of expression, we believed self-actualization would come from this change. Little did we know the consequences would be so grave. Now we know, and knowing is half the battle. Let’s take care of the other half and put America back on track. Let’s wear our dress pants to campus lectures and activities, and when we reenter the work force, let’s be dressed in our best slacks. We won’t get out of this recession until we get back into our pants.